INSIGHTS | CORENTUS FIRST FRIDAY with a THOUGHT LEADER SERIES

Amy Elizabeth Fox & Alexander Caillet
Relational Awareness and Trauma-Informed Culture

Amy Elizabeth Fox and Alexander Caillet discuss what it truly means to be a trauma-informed organization—and why this is a critical for overall organizational success.

For you from Amy, Alex, & Corentus

Amy Elizabeth Fox
A globally recognized leadership strategist and trauma-informed consultant, Amy has spent over two decades guiding Fortune 500 companies through deep culture transformation. As CEO of Mobius Executive Leadership, she integrates psycho-spiritual principles and trauma-informed practices into executive coaching and vertical development programs, helping leaders navigate complexity with agility and purpose.

Alexander Caillet
Co-founder of Corentus, Alexander is an internationally recognized organizational psychologist, consultant, and coach known for his pioneering work in team coaching and state-of-mind research. With over 30 years of experience across five continents, he has led organizational transformations, business turnarounds, and culture change initiatives for top executives and teams worldwide.

“ Relational Awareness and Trauma-Informed Culture ” (43:01)

KEY INSIGHTS | from our First Friday with a Thought Leader Event
Amy Elizabeth Fox & Alexander Caillet “Relational Awareness and Trauma-Informed Culture ”

The Pervasive Impact of Trauma:

  • Definition of Trauma: Trauma is defined as "anything that, in the moment, the mind and the heart find overwhelming to prevent or an incident or a challenge that simply swamps the system's ability to metabolize the emotional.”

  • Lingering Effects: Traumatic experiences can lead to parts of ourselves getting "frozen in time," impacting our operating system until integrated and healed. 

  • Decontextualization: Trauma, when decontextualized over time, can be mistaken for personality traits in individuals, family characteristics, or ingrained behaviors within a people. 

  • Neurological Risk: Trauma triggers survival responses (fight, flight, freeze) by shutting down the neocortex and cognitive processing, leading to reactive and myopic behavior. 

  • Long-Term Consequences: Survival strategies developed in response to past trauma can persist long after the threat has resolved, influencing default behavioral routines. 

  • Increased Vulnerability: Individuals with a history of trauma are more susceptible to being overwhelmed and under-resourced during new challenges and collective stress.

The Need for a Trauma-Informed Lens:

  • Reframing Derailers: Behaviors often labeled as "executive derailers" or "unexplicable behaviors" may have roots in earlier survival strategies. A trauma-informed lens helps interpret these with compassion and reverence rather than judgment. 

  • Understanding Team Dynamics: Fight, flight, or freeze responses manifest in team dynamics, hindering collaboration and psychological safety. Recognizing these as potential trauma responses is crucial for effective intervention.

  • Addressing Underlying Issues: Interventions need to address the underlying trauma and long-held emotions rather than just focusing on surface-level behaviors or cognitive shifts for sustainable change. 

  • Creating Safety and Lowering Fear: Moving towards high performance and excellence requires lowering the level of fear and cultivating more love and caring within the organizational system.

  • Recognizing Immobilization: Lack of participation and withdrawal in teams can also be a symptom of threat and trauma, not just overt conflict. 

 The Role of Spirituality and the "Heart Cave":

  • Resources for Healing: Spirituality, expressive arts, and aesthetics can be powerful resources for organizational vitality, team dynamism, innovation, and deep healing.

  • Three Chambers of the Heart (Shai Tubali): Outer Layer: Responds to moment-by-moment life events.

  • Middle Layer: Holds historic hurts, fear, and terror, which can be activated by current challenges, leading to disproportionate reactions in trauma survivors. 

  • Innermost Chamber (Heart Cave): The core self that cannot be hurt, connected to a unitive field and a sense of the divine. Tapping into this can be a source of strength and resilience. 

  • Facilitator's Role: Facilitators need to attend to their own pain and shadow emotions to become a "wellspring of holding and harboring and witness to other people's" experiences. Deep listening has a co-regulatory capacity. 

What it Means to Do Trauma-Informed Work:

  • Becoming Trauma Literate: Understanding the literature on early childhood trauma, attachment, and developmental absences. 

  • Recognizing Regressive Dimensions: Understanding that individuals have a high-functioning adult dimension and a younger, less resourced regressive dimension that can be triggered by trauma. Practitioners need to be sensitive to this. 

  • Shifting Perspective: Moving from seeing "executive derailers" as weaknesses to understanding them as brilliant survival adaptations from earlier life. 

  • Compassion and Reverence: Approaching behaviors with compassion and reverence for the role they played in the individual's past.

Trauma-Informed Organizations and Leadership:

  • Safety and Threat: Focusing on the level of safety versus threat present within the system and the team's ability to discuss these openly.

  • Addressing Symptoms at All Levels: Recognizing that trauma symptoms manifest at individual, dyadic, team, and organizational architecture levels.

Leadership in a Complex and Anxious World (BANI):

  • BANI Framework: Describing the current environment as Brittle, Anxious, Nonlinear, and Incomprehensible. 

  • Essential Leadership Qualities in a BANI World: Optionality and Fluidity: Ability to pivot easily when systems fail. 

  • Soothing and Self-Awareness: Leaders who can manage their own anxiety and soothe others. 

  • Collective Mindfulness and Groundedness: Practices for resilience in the face of anxiety. 

  • Intuitive Skills and Imagination: Tapping into collective intuition and co-creating the future. 

  • Dancing with Mystery and Soulfulness: Connecting to something wider, transcendental, and transpersonal through practices of devotion, prayer, and activism. 

 Vertical Development:

  • Moving Beyond Cognitive Behavioral Approaches: Recognizing that simply changing behaviors or mental models is often short-lived. 

  • Addressing Core Fears and Unmet Needs: Sustainable change requires going deeper to explore long-held emotions, fundamental root fears, and unprocessed grief.

  • Healing the Heart: Vertical development at this level is about healing and addressing the root causes of behavior.

 

"So being trauma sensitive means I bring not only compassion, but reverence for what otherwise I might judge if I'm not trauma-informed"

- Amy Elizabeth Fox

First Friday with a Thought Leader is a monthly live event for the Corentus Community of Professionals Advancing Team Effectiveness.
Interested in being a member of this professional community and/or receiving our monthly enewsletter? Let us know:

Vertical Development:

  • Moving Beyond Cognitive Behavioral Approaches: Recognizing that simply changing behaviors or mental models is often short-lived. 

  • Addressing Core Fears and Unmet Needs: Sustainable change requires going deeper to explore long-held emotions, fundamental root fears, and unprocessed grief.

  • Healing the Heart: Vertical development at this level is about healing and addressing the root causes of behavior.

 Boundaries for Non-Clinically Trained Coaches:

  • Challenging the Therapist/Coach Dichotomy: Moving beyond the artificial separation of therapists focusing on the past and coaches on the future. 

  • Individual Discernment: Each coach needs to assess their capacity to hold a conversation and discern when a situation feels outside their ability to contain and engage with.

  • Red Flags: Danger to self or others and active flashbacks may indicate the need for psychotherapeutic support. 

  • Importance of Empathy and Attunement: A coach's empathetic presence and attuned relational repertoire can be meaningfully healing, even with difficult stories. 

  • Supervision and Collaboration: The importance of supervision and collaboration with trauma-trained psychotherapists for guidance and support. 

Pitching Trauma-Informed Coaching:

  • Focus on Outcomes: Pitching in terms of desired business outcomes like high-performing teams, collective intelligence, innovation, psychological safety, and feedback-rich cultures. 

  • Identifying the "When": Situations where traditional coaching has stalled, teams are stuck in conflict, or there's a lack of psychological safety can be opportune moments.

  • Highlighting Deeper Work: Emphasizing that getting to the root of issues requires a deeper approach beyond behavioral changes. 

  • Transparency vs. Trojan Horse: Adapting the level of explicitness about the "trauma" aspect based on the buyer's understanding and openness. 

  • Importance of an Ally: Having at least one person within the company who understands and supports the trauma-informed approach is crucial for success. 

Working with Organizational Trauma:

  • Parallel Healing: Addressing both deep psycho-spiritual healing and organizational repair when the organization itself has been a source of trauma.

  • Collective Awareness and Ownership: The leadership needs to acknowledge what happened and take collective responsibility for the resolution. 

  • Creating Space for the Unspeakable: Ownership creates a fertile ground for previously unspoken truths to emerge.